


No Need To Fantasy

by sanssssastark



Series: Let Me See What's Underneath [4]
Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV 2020)
Genre: Aged up characters, F/M, Julie has a very active imagination, Luke is super sexy while working out obviously, Sexual Fantasy, The Boys Are Alive - AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:09:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29691369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanssssastark/pseuds/sanssssastark
Summary: Julie goes to the gym with Luke to prep for their upcoming tour and she should have seen this coming really, that working out with Luke would be a problem.
Relationships: Julie Molina/Luke Patterson
Series: Let Me See What's Underneath [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2062191
Comments: 27
Kudos: 187





	No Need To Fantasy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pearlcaddy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pearlcaddy/gifts).



> This takes place after the Rolling Stone photoshoot and before Let Me See What's Underneath and is entirely the brainchild of Pearlcaddy who put the idea of Luke grunting while working out and how distracting that would be for Julie into my head. Anyway, we all know just how vivid Julie's imagination can get! 
> 
> Highly recommend listening to Dirty Honey's Rolling 7s and Down the Road while you're reading. The first is explicitly in the fic, and where the title comes from, the other is vaguely referenced.

“She’s with me,” Luke says to the completely disinterested kid at the counter bopping along to whatever music is blaring through his airpods. He can’t be much younger than they are, seventeen, maybe eighteen at most though. Without looking up, the kid gestures toward where Luke’s apparently supposed to scan something with his phone and presses a couple of keys on the computer in front of him. Luke nods back toward Julie as the kid looks up at them.

The kid stops and stares, jaw literally dropping open. Looks at Luke and then back to Julie and then back to Luke again, eyes wide in clear disbelief.

“Uh, you’re...you guys are….” he manages to stutter out, but then stops and just blinks at them for a minute like he's making sure this is real. “Can I...can I get a pic?”

Luke shoots the kid a half smirk. “Sure.” He steps toward the counter and Julie follows, shaking her head. They pose as the kid turns around and snaps a selfie. 

He swore up and down that the gym was chill and that they’d probably just be left alone. 

_“I’ve been going there since I was fifteen. Everyone knows me and they’re not gonna care.”_

The kid must be new.

She really should know better by now. It’s not that she minds when fans come up to them and ask for a pic or just chat. It’s not overwhelming...yet. In fact, most people don’t recognize them unless two or three of them are out together. If it’s all four of them, though, there’s almost zero chance of privacy. That’s the price of a number one album, isn't it? There's always a trade off.

Julie was just hoping for a bit of anonymity today because she’s never been to the gym before. Ever. And she’s pretty sure she’s about to make a total idiot out of herself.

Working out isn’t a thing she does. She’s always stayed in pretty decent shape, taking long walks and, before she graduated high school, dance classes. So her physical endurance was always pretty good. 

That was two years ago though and they’re a month out from a national tour. Their first as a headliner. Last summer when they opened for Trevor Wilson, their sets hadn’t been much longer than forty five minutes. Five or six songs running on sugar and caffeine and the adrenaline from playing in a huge stadium with tens of thousands of people cheering them on and then off the stage with the crowd hyped for the real show.

This time? It’s going to be two and a half to three hours of performing on stage. Forty cities in two months. Luke started to bug all of them about it as soon as Andi talked them through the details. 

_“You guys, that’s a grind. You need to start coming to the gym with me.”_

Alex waved him off, insisting he was getting plenty of exercise and Luke had narrowed his eyes because they all knew the implication was that exercise was taking place behind his closed bedroom door with his boyfriend Willie.

_“That’s not the same thing.”_

But Alex was a no. Reggie had relented, but refused to go with Luke. 

_“Dude, I am not working out next to you. Retro grunge in a leather jacket works for me on the day to day, but at the gym next to Muscles McSleeveless and I’ve got no shot.”_

Reggie hired a personal trainer, who Julie is pretty sure he’s also sleeping with, but that’s none of her business. 

That just left Julie.

_“C’mon, you’re already in great shape,” Luke said, his eyes flickering over her briefly in a way that made every inch of her skin tingle in anticipation that looking might lead to touching. It didn’t. Obviously. “We just gotta build up your endurance a little. You’re our frontwoman. You don’t get the little breaks we get. Can’t have you passing out on stage.”_

So here she is, at the gym he’s been going to since they were kids because he swore he wasn’t going to be one of those rock stars who had to check themselves into rehab for exhaustion, before he realized what exhaustion was code for, obviously. He kept at it though, even swore that he _liked_ it. That seems fake, but okay. The air around her smells faintly of sweat, which makes sense, and industrial cleaner, which is comforting honestly because she always thought of gyms as dirty places. How could they not be? But this place seems pretty clean.

He leads her forward into a large open room with high ceilings, exposed steel beams crisscrossing over their heads and a sea of intimidating as all hell machines that she’s apparently supposed to figure out how to contort her body into. 

“Um…” she hums, eyes wide, stopping to twist her mouth in doubt. This was a bad idea.

“Don’t stress,” he says, falling back to her. “I’m gonna get you set up on an elliptical. Low impact, get your heart rate up, work up a sweat, okay?”

She bites her lip, still unsure, but pulling her hair up out of her face and twisting it into a bun at the top of her head. 

Luke nods in approval. “Nothing crazy. I promise. Not for your first time,” he says softly as they walk toward a row of machines lining the wall. 

Julie lets out a soft laugh because her brain can’t not interpret those words in a different way. Not that it would be her first time. That ship has sailed, obviously, but ever since she and Nick broke up (ever since Nick dumped her ass, actually) and she realized the sheer enormity of the lies she’d been telling herself for years about Luke and her feelings for him, her mind had been completely and totally in the gutter. Every look, every touch, every everything...is just entirely sexual, at least it is in her head.

It’s like she’s been bottling it up since she was fourteen, stifling every inappropriate feeling until now at nearly twenty they were all spilling out all the time. Hell, the only reason she’s here is because he looked at her with those pleading eyes, biting his lower lip and she’d found herself agreeing to whatever the hell he said while she wondered what it would feel like to have him bite her lip.

“Julie?” Luke asks and shit she did it again. “Did you get any of that?”

Blinking, she turns to him with a blank look. “Um, yes?”

He chuckles and rolls his eyes affectionately. “Always daydreaming.” If he only knew. “Anyway, it’s pretty self explanatory. You pick the speed, you pick the level of resistance, which just controls how hard it is to move the pedals and you’re good to go. Try it on a lower speed and resistance to get comfortable with the motion, it’s a little bit weird at first. I'll set it for an hour, but maybe do a half hour to get your bearings at these settings and then raise them when you feel ready?”

He punches in some numbers that she tries to clock and doesn’t because even his fingers are distracting as all hell. 

They’re not especially long, but they’re wider than most guys and his guitar calluses are so thick that she can make them out easily even with her crappy eyesight. She’s spent far more time than she’ll ever admit to anyone wondering exactly what those fingers would feel like against her bare skin, in places that he’s never touched before. It only got worse after that _Rolling Stone_ shoot last week. She’s still not quite sure how it happened, but just as they began, his hand had skimmed along the curve of her waist and onto her back, his fingers spread fully against her bare skin. She’d been having fantasies based solely on the feel of his pinky softly circling the dimples she knew that sat at the small of her back every night since.

The motion had drawn her mind to the other places on her body the rough pads of his fingertips could circle lazily until she worked up the kind of heart rate and sweat he was talking about before.

Climbing on to the machine, he presses the start button, before nodding at her. The pedals move a bit and she moves with them, slowly at first and then speeds up, not too fast, but not so slow that it feels like she isn’t doing anything at all. Less than a minute and she’s feeling good about it, the leg motion a little strange, like he said, but not too weird.

Luke taps her thigh gently and grins when she smiles down at him. “You look good up there.”

Something in her chest flashes and her mind dives straight into how he might say that with her thighs straddling his, the up and down motion of the elliptical machine’s stride giving her fantasy a little more credence than usual. 

She manages to push it out of her head and nod, but then with a nod, he’s taking a step away and then another.

“Wait, where are you going?” she asks and she hopes it doesn’t sound nearly as needy as she feels like it probably did.

“I gotta work out too,” he says, laughing, turning toward her again. “I’m actually just headed over there.” He points to the row of machines facing her. 

“You don’t do cardio?”

“Nah, not today anyway. Lifting.”

She nods and for a second almost loses her balance. “Shit.”

“Easy there, boss,” he says, reaching out, but she steadies herself and he drops his hand. She kind of wishes that she’d actually fallen, which is ridiculous. She needs to get a hold of herself. “Hang on. Take this.” He offers her one of his air pods. “The music will help you keep the rhythm.” 

She plugs it into her ear as he moves off toward a machine that looks way more like a deathtrap than anything that will help him work out. He stretches for a bit, messes with the weights attached to the machine and folds himself into it. Then he pulls out his phone and presses play on what they were listening to in the car on the way over. 

The sultry guitar riffs of Dirty Honey’s Rolling 7s pour through the one earbud and she shoots him a grin as Marc Labelle’s voice starts to slowly drawl over the beat set by the rhythm guitar and the drums. 

_No need to socialize. No need to fantasy. I’ll shine on, like a star at first night and show you all you need. Now I know all my vices and I know where you’ve been. Baby, take another toss of the dice. I’m rolling sevens again. When you need a little lovin’. Baby all night long. When you need a little lovin’. Come and turn me on. When you need a little lovin’. All night long. When you need a little lovin’. Oh yeah!_

It perfectly matches the stride of her machine and quickly she finds the rhythm he was talking about. She actually has to catch herself because she’s humming along and if she’s not careful, without thinking she’ll just start singing along for everyone in the gym to hear.

A free concert? Maybe next time because this isn’t as bad as she thought it was going to be. She can do this and with a month until the tour she has time to build up her speed and resistance so a two and a half hour set will feel like nothing. 

Looking over to where he’s sitting, she shoots him a grin and he smiles back before breaking eye contact to reach up behind him and grip the bar hanging over his head.

Her grin drops and her mouth goes entirely dry as his sleeveless shirt, obviously, does nothing to hide the expanse of muscle in his biceps. As he stretches up entirely, his shoulders bunch together like a fucking mountain range, then he pulls down the bar and it collapses slowly into a smooth plain Again. She has to swallow a groan as the chords of his neck stand out the way they do when he’s laser focused on a guitar solo, his entire soul pouring out through the electric strings.

The music pounding in her ears, a raucous, wild beat and the sight of him would be enough to send her spiraling, but then as he goes into another rep, he lets out a soft groan, just loud enough for her to hear. The weights are heavy, her brain justifies, of course he’s groaning. How did she not realize this would be a problem? He’s in amazing shape, how did she think that happened? Magic? She wouldn’t even be able to lift the weights he’s working with an inch, let alone fully up and down over and over again.

And that was the wrong thought to have because her mind spins out of control when his eyes fall closed as he slowly moves the weights up and down in a measured pace with clear purpose, to make sure his muscles really feel the weight. 

Julie’s lungs scream for air and she manages to suck in a deep breath just before it all goes to hell. He opens his eyes and through fate’s sick sense of humor they meet hers and hold. Her heart rate ticks up another ten notches and a light sheen of sweat starts to gather over her skin.

Fuck.

The song in her headphones ends and another starts up, this one slower, but just as powerful, the notes being drawn out with agonizing intention, the same way he’s lifting. 

She can’t break the contact. It’s too intoxicating. He’s looked at her like this before, so many times, gazing at her from across the stage or when they’re just inches apart sharing a microphone. It’s their thing. It always has been. It’s not his fault that her mind has created this fantasy world in which every look and touch between them means so much more, could lead to so much more. 

It’s so easy to imagine, with this rock ballad echoing in her ears, how this could play out differently. If they were alone and not in this public gym with dozens of people around. If he was just across the room from her, sitting in a chair and staring at her, drawing her in with his eyes, beckoning her to him with a flick of his head, eyes hot and heavy lidded, a wicked smile spreading over his mouth. She could walk over to him, watch him watching her, with his chest rising and falling faster with every step she takes. His eyes would take her in from the top of her head, burning an invisible path over her skin, lingering at her breasts, at the dip of her waist, at the flare of her hips and the curve of her ass, the length of her legs. 

Then she’d climb into his lap, their clothes long gone. 

How? 

Who cares? 

She could run her fingertips over the long rise of his shoulders, the bulges of his biceps that lead into the leaner chorded muscles of his forearms. And she could lean down and run her tongue over the lines of his chest. Those shirts of his do very little to hide the firm planes there and the easy ridges that line his stomach. She knows the lines of his body better than anyone's. It's been a fascination of hers since she was fourteen years old and years of dedicated workouts and the weight of his guitar and the intensity of his playing and his inability to sit still without vibrating out of his skin have created a form that looks like it’s carved out of stone. Except she knows he’s not. He’s warm skin and strong arms and sea glass eyes and the man she fucking loves.

Shit. 

Julie tries to keep her breathing even as sweat starts to bead as his forehead and then runs in slow rivulets past his temples over the line of his jaw and if she was where she wanted to be, her body over his, fingers buried in his hair, she’d catch one of the salty drops with her tongue as his mouth worked over her neck and his hands grasp her hips, sliding her against him, creating an impossible friction. 

He’d groan, just like he is right now as the weights grow harder to lift the longer he is into the set, but if she had her way, it would be when the light tough of her mouth is replaced by the soft scrape of her teeth at the place his neck meets his shoulder. His hands would lift her, separating their slick skin just for a moment so their bodies can fully align and she’d slide down onto him, letting him stretch her in ways she’s been dreaming about since she was old enough to know what it meant to _want_.

It’s easy to imagine how good it would feel, to finally feel him inside of her. How he would let her take control with a softly rasped, “C’mon boss, this is your show” against her ear, the way he does when they're on stage and she takes the lead. He’d wrap his arms around her and she’d feel safe and protected and free and powerful all at once, just like he’s always made her feel. They would draw it out, long and slow and deep, their bodies learning each other the way their souls already have. Her mouth would find his and she’d murmur everything she’s ever felt for him into those kisses. 

Eventually, they’d find that perfect rhythm, their eyes meeting, just like now, saying more than words or songs ever really could, no matter how hard they’ve tried and she’d throw her head back as her entire body shook with release while he buries his head against the swell of her breasts, licking away the trail of sweat shining on her skin. And then, spent, they’d just breathe together for however long it took to come down from that high. Maybe forever. She could easily spend forever in his arms.

His eyes flash something warm and glowing and it’s too much. She has to look away, her heart is beating a fucking drum solo that Alex would be proud of and breath is coming in heavy gasps that she needs to slow in order to keep her legs under her.

Holy shit. It...it felt so real, like she could feel him there with her, under her, inside her.

Her legs are shaky, but far more steady by the time the song changes. Or maybe it changed three or four times already. She has no idea. When she looks up again, Luke isn’t at that machine any more. He’s moved on, facing away from her on some kind of jungle gym style thing, holding himself aloft, legs bent at the knee, crossed at the ankle as he lifts himself up off the ground over and over again. Those shoulder and back muscles that led her astray however long ago now, are on full display, his shirt in a ball on the floor beside his water bottle.

The machine beeps at her. It’s been an hour. How is that possible? Shaking her head, she lets it guide her through a slow cool down cycle. Flynn always said that when she creates a world she really lives in it, but this is...this too much. It’s dangerous. She loves Luke, but he’s her best friend, her bandmate, her writing partner and fucking that up because...why? Because he’s gorgeous and she’s feeling unloved. No, that’s just...not okay. She needs to get herself uncontrol before they go on tour or something is going to happen that she can’t take back and what will she have then?

“Hey,” a voice brings her back to reality. Luke, standing next to her machine, hair matted down with sweat, a towel thrown over his shoulder and eyes shining with the exercise. “I saw you cooling down. You finished?”

“Yeah,” she agrees, sending him a tight smile, trying to make her brain _not_ go there again and taking a towel that he holds out to her. “Yeah, I’m all done.”

“Sweet,” he says, returning her smile. His eyes flicker over her and that heat she’d just managed to quell comes roaring back to life. She wipes at her face with the towel, trying to keep from falling into his eyes again, especially not when he’s smiling at her that sweetly and it’s so easy to imagine how he’d look at her that way from the other side of the bed, reaching for her. “Looks like you got a good work out in.”

“I did.”

"You glad you came?" he needles her just a little bit and she wonders...is he doing it on purpose? Or is she just doomed to suffer like this for the rest of her life.

Part of her wants to raise an eyebrow and shoot back something about how she _didn't_ come actually and would he like to help her out there, but she doesn't because he has no idea what's been going on in her head for weeks now...well, years, but that doesn't really count, does it?

"Yeah, I'm glad," she says instead.

“So, you coming tomorrow?” he asks, eyes glittering up at her with sweet mischief, like he’s daring her to say no, a challenge there, to not give up. It's not innuendo, at least not on purpose. He just wants to help her and he knows the best way to do that is to tease her about it. He knows her too well.

She should turn him down. She should tell him that she can’t and that she’ll find some other way to get ready for the tour, but his eyes are so…and he’s so...and she can’t stop herself from saying, “Of course I am. Maybe...maybe you could show me the machines?” 

Holding out his hand to her, he helps her down from the elliptical and for a second her legs kind of buckle. He catches her easily and then tucks her into his sweaty side, shirt back on and sticking to him. 

It should be gross. 

It’s not. 

He's warm and solid and real. She loves him so much.

“Easy there, boss. It takes a second to get your sea legs with those things. C’mon, we’ve earned a smoothie.” 

Despite herself she laughs and when he throws his arm around her she doesn’t pull away as they walk together toward the juice bar in the far corner. “I’m not drinking one of those protein things. They do like fruit and shit too, right?”

“One fruit and shit smoothie coming up,” he confirms before pressing a kiss to her temple. It’s simple, the kiss platonic and sweet and nothing more than a sign of his affection for her. He’s done it before. He’ll do it again. It’s fine. Julie will take what she can get because, this? It’s so easy. _They_ are so easy. They’re perfect. She can’t mess this up. She can’t lose this. Not for a stupid fantasy. Not for anything.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked it (or if you didn't!) let me know! I live for your feedback and comments.


End file.
